Showing posts with label wga. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wga. Show all posts
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Happy May Day
That's GEO/University of Michigan organizers celebrating their contract victory after a one day strike earlier this semester. I stole it from Youtube.
Here's another one, which takes us from Lawrence 1912, Joe Hill, Lucy Parsons, through the 1934 San Francisco longshoremen's strike, up to Cesar Chavez and the Delano Grape Boycott.
And some footage of the 2006 LA May Day March...:
Monday, February 18, 2008
I wonder what the WGA settlement would look like if Hollywood was organized Industrially rather than by craft. For those of you not familiar with Terrence Powderly, Eugene V. Debs, or John L. Lewis, what i am talking about is if, instead of being split between and among above the line guilds and the below the line mix of craft and industrial unions - IATSE, IBT, etc etc - Actually i guess those are all (nominally, at least,) craft unions - Movie and TV industry workers were all part of the same union or federation of unions coordinating their actions with each other. I'm no expert on the film and TV industries and i'm not particularly knowledgeable about the labor history of said industry. But so many commentators have remarked that so much of this strike's outcome was determined by and against the settlement that the DGA reached with the AMPTP a few weeks prior to the end of the strike.
Revisionist labor history of the 70s and 80s greatly complicated the conventional read on craft unionism as exclusionary and limiting. It allowed and allows for particular kinds of labor arrangements, particular cultures of work, particular kinds of subjectivity. Dorothy Sue Cobble's Dishing It Out (1990) on waitresses in what we now call Unite-HERE is particularly instructive, but think about Bruce Nelson's argument that segregated locals in the fin de siecle South sometimes made it possible for black workers ot have more power over their labor than in 'progressive,' multiravcial, integrated locals elsewhere and later.
Fine. Point taken. But, and I'm not sure Cobble's book sufficiently deals with this, craft unionism IS limiting, and it IS exclusionary. Exclusionary in the sense i pointed to last november - why don't those BTL service workers get to negotiate for residuals too? - and limiting, certainly, in the sense that more radical and strategic forms of solidarity and direct action become untenable, even if, as in this case, the threat of what the IWW used to call "union scabbing" - when one union remains at work while another strikes - was avoided. Indeed, one of the most intriguing demands of the strikers, to extend jurisdiction to reality TV 'story editors' and animation writers, was dropped in exchange for what many feel was not enough of an inroad into "New Media" ownership rights. What if the DGA, SAG, and WGA/W/E weren't just de facto striking together -- what if they were negotiating together? And what if the other union were at the table with them?
Revisionist labor history of the 70s and 80s greatly complicated the conventional read on craft unionism as exclusionary and limiting. It allowed and allows for particular kinds of labor arrangements, particular cultures of work, particular kinds of subjectivity. Dorothy Sue Cobble's Dishing It Out (1990) on waitresses in what we now call Unite-HERE is particularly instructive, but think about Bruce Nelson's argument that segregated locals in the fin de siecle South sometimes made it possible for black workers ot have more power over their labor than in 'progressive,' multiravcial, integrated locals elsewhere and later.
Fine. Point taken. But, and I'm not sure Cobble's book sufficiently deals with this, craft unionism IS limiting, and it IS exclusionary. Exclusionary in the sense i pointed to last november - why don't those BTL service workers get to negotiate for residuals too? - and limiting, certainly, in the sense that more radical and strategic forms of solidarity and direct action become untenable, even if, as in this case, the threat of what the IWW used to call "union scabbing" - when one union remains at work while another strikes - was avoided. Indeed, one of the most intriguing demands of the strikers, to extend jurisdiction to reality TV 'story editors' and animation writers, was dropped in exchange for what many feel was not enough of an inroad into "New Media" ownership rights. What if the DGA, SAG, and WGA/W/E weren't just de facto striking together -- what if they were negotiating together? And what if the other union were at the table with them?
Friday, February 15, 2008
Harlan Ellison did not like the WGA settlement.
My Guild did what it did in 1988. It trembled and sold us out. It gave
away the EXACT co-terminus expiration date with SAG for some bullshit
short-line substitute; it got us no more control of our words; it
sneak-abandoned the animator and reality beanfield hands before anyone
even forced it on them; it made nice so no one would think we were
meanies; it let the Alliance play us like the village idiot. The WGAw
folded like a Texaco Road Map from back in the day.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Why You SHOULD Support The Writers' Strike
Yes, there's something alluring, if anachronistic (hearkening back to Hollywood's red days and the pre-HUAC thirties) and perhaps ridiculous about the photographs of America Ferrera and, in Grey's Anatomy scrubs, Sandra Oh and Ellen Pompeo walking the WGA picket lines in solidarity with the strikers, and press has tended to focus on the disruptions the strike causes (no more Daily Show, so much for Steven Colbert's presidential aspirations, etc, how will we ever get to see Jack Bauer valorize torture?) rather than what's at stake in the demands and dispute which have brought us to this moment.
I want to argue that you should support the strike, not ironically, and not only because it's the right thing to do to support strikes that aren't hate strikes and aren't out to disenfranchise one group of workers at another's expense, but instead because what's at stake here winds up being rather important.
Sure, the Jane Espensons of the world aren't exactly an immiserated proletariat. They make lots of money. They don't work in mines. They're mostly white, mostly male. Why should you give a fuck?
Because what's at stake here winds up being the relationship between the labor that generates "intellectual property" and the ownership and distribution rights of said "property, a key question" for those of interested in questions of what Andrew Ross has called "the Mental Labor problem," or what the Italian autonomist marxists - notably Lazzarato, call immaterial labor - the labor that generates the informational and cultural content of the commodity. What control intellectual workers should have over what they produce winds up being relevant to a far broader swathe of workers than well-paid TV writers. Think of international graduate student researchers in biology labs at universities all over the country, helping to produce pharmaceutical and other medical patents in which they will have no ownership rights. The two cases are not quite the same - the writers are simply asking for a stake in one particular arena, that of digital reproduction of the tv show - but still they seem to be to be calling the question of who owns and profits from intellectual work.
We may, ultimately, want to throw out the entire concept of intellectual property as extremely deleterious for much of the world, or as now stifling the very innovation it was supposed to encourage and protect. That's fine. I don't think such a goal and supporting the strikers demands are mutually exclusive though. As long as profit is the extraction of the unpaid (excess) labor that goes into the production of a commodity, attempts to recognize that labor, to bring it to the fore, are important and worth fighting for.
That said, we can't ignore the role that other forms of labor play in the creation of the tv show as a commodity and as a unit of intellectual property. We can't fetishize the writers and their celebrated creative work as the only labor that makes possible the creation, or even the writing of a television show. I'm thinking not only of camerapeople, editors, set designers, but also parking productions assistants, janitors, food service workers, the workers who actually work in the factories that produce the dvds and tivos and home theater systems that have precipitated the so-called revolution in viewing which has led the writers to make the demands that the studios are refusing to meet, as well as, perhaps, the people who clean the writers' apartments, take care of their children, cook the food they eat. So while we should support the writer's strike, we should also insist that it be augmented, broadened to address the often invisible forms of labor that we don't often think about in conversations about creative labor and intellectual property.
Now back to my exam.
I want to argue that you should support the strike, not ironically, and not only because it's the right thing to do to support strikes that aren't hate strikes and aren't out to disenfranchise one group of workers at another's expense, but instead because what's at stake here winds up being rather important.
Sure, the Jane Espensons of the world aren't exactly an immiserated proletariat. They make lots of money. They don't work in mines. They're mostly white, mostly male. Why should you give a fuck?
Because what's at stake here winds up being the relationship between the labor that generates "intellectual property" and the ownership and distribution rights of said "property, a key question" for those of interested in questions of what Andrew Ross has called "the Mental Labor problem," or what the Italian autonomist marxists - notably Lazzarato, call immaterial labor - the labor that generates the informational and cultural content of the commodity. What control intellectual workers should have over what they produce winds up being relevant to a far broader swathe of workers than well-paid TV writers. Think of international graduate student researchers in biology labs at universities all over the country, helping to produce pharmaceutical and other medical patents in which they will have no ownership rights. The two cases are not quite the same - the writers are simply asking for a stake in one particular arena, that of digital reproduction of the tv show - but still they seem to be to be calling the question of who owns and profits from intellectual work.
We may, ultimately, want to throw out the entire concept of intellectual property as extremely deleterious for much of the world, or as now stifling the very innovation it was supposed to encourage and protect. That's fine. I don't think such a goal and supporting the strikers demands are mutually exclusive though. As long as profit is the extraction of the unpaid (excess) labor that goes into the production of a commodity, attempts to recognize that labor, to bring it to the fore, are important and worth fighting for.
That said, we can't ignore the role that other forms of labor play in the creation of the tv show as a commodity and as a unit of intellectual property. We can't fetishize the writers and their celebrated creative work as the only labor that makes possible the creation, or even the writing of a television show. I'm thinking not only of camerapeople, editors, set designers, but also parking productions assistants, janitors, food service workers, the workers who actually work in the factories that produce the dvds and tivos and home theater systems that have precipitated the so-called revolution in viewing which has led the writers to make the demands that the studios are refusing to meet, as well as, perhaps, the people who clean the writers' apartments, take care of their children, cook the food they eat. So while we should support the writer's strike, we should also insist that it be augmented, broadened to address the often invisible forms of labor that we don't often think about in conversations about creative labor and intellectual property.
Now back to my exam.
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